In 2024, the average winning House campaign spent approximately $2.5 million. The average winning Senate campaign spent approximately $22 million. In competitive Senate races, the ones that actually determine the majority, spending regularly exceeded $50 million per candidate, and in a handful of races exceeded $100 million.
The median American household income is approximately $75,000 per year.
To fund a competitive House race from median-income donations alone, contributions of $50 or $100 at a time, the amounts ordinary people give when they give at all, would require tens of thousands of individual donors. Most campaigns do not find them. They find a smaller number of donors giving much larger amounts, and they structure their time, their positions, and their relationships accordingly.
A senator who spends six years in office and must raise $30 million to run a competitive reelection campaign needs to raise approximately $14,000 every single day, weekdays, weekends, holidays, during sessions, during recesses, every day of a six-year term. The political consulting industry has a term for the blocks of time members of Congress spend making fundraising calls from party-designated call centers near the Capitol: “call time.” For many members, call time occupies three to five hours of every working day.
The people on the other end of those calls are not median-income voters. They are the people with the capacity to write checks of $1,000, $3,300, or more per election cycle, and the people who direct the independent expenditure committees and dark money organizations that now dominate campaign spending at the highest levels.
Centinel warned in 1787 that the government would fall into the hands of the wealthy and well-connected. He did not know about Citizens United. He understood the mechanism that made it possible.
What Citizens United Did and Did Not Do
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided in January 2010, held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations, associations, and labor unions. Independent expenditures, spending on political communication that is not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, could not be limited.
The case is frequently cited as the source of money’s dominance in American politics, but that framing is too simple. Money was dominant before Citizens United. What the decision did was remove one category of limit, on independent corporate and union spending, while leaving others in place. Direct contributions to candidates remain limited. Coordination between outside groups and campaigns remains officially prohibited (the prohibition is imperfectly enforced).
What Citizens United enabled, combined with subsequent court decisions and regulatory interpretations, was the rise of the super PAC, a committee that can raise unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, and unions for independent expenditure, and the dark money 501(c)(4) organization, which can spend on political activity without disclosing its donors.
The practical result: in the 2024 election cycle, total spending on federal elections exceeded $16 billion. A significant fraction of that money came through channels where the ultimate sources are not publicly disclosed. The donors who most influence the political landscape are, in an increasing share of cases, unknown to the voters whose representatives they are helping to select.
The Time Tax on Elected Officials
The campaign finance system imposes a specific and rarely discussed cost on the quality of democratic governance: it consumes an enormous fraction of the time and attention of the elected officials who are supposed to be governing.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House campaign committees of both parties, expect freshman members of Congress to spend four hours per day on “call time”, dialing donors, attending fundraisers, building the financial relationships that sustain a congressional career. For members in competitive districts, the expectation is higher. Leadership positions require even more intensive fundraising, because committee chairs and party leaders are expected to raise money not just for themselves but for the committee and for members in tough races.
A member of Congress who spends four hours per day on fundraising is spending half of an eight-hour working day on an activity that has nothing to do with legislation, constituent service, committee work, or policy development. The time cost is not incidental. It is structurally built into what it means to hold office in the current system.
The Federal Farmer argued that genuine representation required representatives who knew their constituents, who understood their circumstances, their concerns, and their daily conditions. A representative who spends half their working hours on call with donors in their party’s fundraising database does not have that knowledge. They have the donor database’s knowledge, which is the knowledge of organized, wealthy, and institutionally connected interests.
Who Fills the Gap
When elected officials cannot spend sufficient time on policy, the gap is filled by the people who can, and who have institutional incentives to fill it.
Lobbyists and staff from trade associations and advocacy organizations write legislative language that members introduce. They provide the policy expertise that understaffed congressional offices cannot develop internally. They build the relationships with committee staff that translate policy priorities into specific legislative provisions. They prepare members for committee hearings with briefing materials that frame the issues in ways that serve their clients’ interests.
This is not uniformly corrupt or illegitimate. Legislative complexity requires expertise, and expertise often comes from organized interests. The structural problem is the imbalance: the industries and interests with the resources to maintain permanent Washington presences, hire former congressional staff, and fund the campaigns of members who serve on relevant committees have a degree of policy access and influence that diffuse citizen interests, the working family, the rural community, the small business owner, cannot match.
Centinel described this dynamic in its eighteenth-century form: the wealthy and connected would navigate the federal government better than ordinary citizens, because proximity to power requires resources that ordinary citizens do not have. The modern campaign finance system is the mechanism that converts financial resources into political access at the most fundamental level, the selection of who holds office in the first place.
The Non-Partisan Reality
Dark money and super PAC spending flows to both parties. The largest donors to Democratic outside groups, major tech executives, financiers, trial lawyers, are not the same people as the largest donors to Republican outside groups, major energy producers, financial firms, real estate interests, but the structural dynamic is identical. Both parties have wealthy donor bases whose interests shape the policy positions of the elected officials they fund.
Both parties have proposed campaign finance reform when positioned as the party with less money, and both parties have declined to advance such reform when positioned as the party with more. The pattern is consistent enough to be structural: the party that benefits from the current arrangement resists changing it, and which party benefits shifts over time while the arrangement itself persists.
The specific harm to rural and working-class communities is direct. Rural small businesses, family farms, and working-class economic interests do not have Washington lobbying operations. They do not have dark money 501(c)(4) organizations running million-dollar advocacy campaigns. They do not have former senators and congressional staffers on retainer to navigate the federal process on their behalf.
What they have is the vote, one citizen, one vote, in the formal democratic mechanism. What they face is a system in which the effective decision-making about policy has, increasingly, been influenced before the vote is ever cast, through candidate selection, through policy development, through the fundraising relationships that determine which positions candidates hold and which they abandon.
The Structural Question
The Supreme Court has held that political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. This means legislative solutions to campaign finance face significant constitutional constraints, any law that limits political spending will be challenged and may be struck down.
This is why campaign finance reform has ended up on the Article V list alongside the other structural failures in this series. A constitutional amendment that explicitly authorizes reasonable regulation of campaign spending and disclosure requirements, overriding the line of Supreme Court decisions that has treated spending limits as First Amendment violations, is the structural solution that survives judicial review.
Short of that amendment, disclosure is the most achievable reform: requiring that the ultimate sources of all political spending be publicly disclosed, regardless of the organizational vehicle through which the money flows. The dark money system functions partly because voters cannot know who is spending to influence their representatives. Transparency does not eliminate the influence of money, but it allows voters to contextualize the information they receive and hold elected officials accountable for their donor relationships.
Neither full reform nor disclosure has been achieved at the federal level. Both parties have blocked the other’s proposals on campaign finance when those proposals threatened their own donor advantages. The system that produces this outcome is the system the Federal Farmer described: organized interests maintain their advantages by operating inside the system that ordinary citizens cannot afford to navigate. Campaign finance is the lever closest to the source, the one that shapes who gets to govern before any law is ever written.
Centinel, Letter I, October 5, 1787. Federal Farmer, Letter II, October 9, 1787. Available at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, and the Library of Congress American Memory collection. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).